Karen Bass promised she would end street homelessness in Los Angeles by 2026.
She didn't – and now even the comedians who grew up there are done waiting.
Adam Carolla just said out loud what 54,000 Los Angeles residents decided with their moving trucks last year.
From Dream City to Escape Hatch
Carolla wasn't talking about a policy paper.
He was talking about a feeling.
"No one ever left LA," he said Tuesday on the Hang Out with Sean Hannity podcast.
He described a city where leaving once made zero sense – where someone moving to Tennessee would have seemed incomprehensible.
"When you're from LA, back in the day, if somebody said, 'We're moving to Tennessee…' I didn't know where Tennessee was," he said.
https://twitter.com/JeffVaughn/status/2097712829638021570?s=20
Now he knows where Tennessee is.
So do 54,000 of his former neighbors who left Los Angeles County in the single year between July 2024 and July 2025 – the largest population drop of any county in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That's not a recession number.
That's not a pandemic anomaly.
That's people making a deliberate choice to leave one of the most desirable cities on earth.
Carolla nailed exactly why the shift is different this time: the destination stopped mattering.
"Now, people leave LA, and you go, 'Where are you going?' And they go, 'Anywhere,'" he said.
When people stop caring where they're going – only where they're leaving – the city is broken.
Karen Bass Had Three Years and One Promise
Karen Bass ran for mayor of Los Angeles on a single promise.
In 2023, she told CNN's Jake Tapper she would end street homelessness in the city by 2026.
She got elected.
She got three years.
By 2026, CNN anchor Elex Michaelson was pressing her on camera about what happened to that promise.
She admitted she hadn't come close – and blamed "bureaucratic barriers."
Then the official homeless count came in.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported overall homelessness had increased 3.4% in 2026.
The number of people living outdoors or in their cars – not in shelters, not in programs, on the actual streets – rose 7.9%.
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2095206047996604432?s=20
There are now 45,194 homeless people living in the city of Los Angeles.
Bass dissolved LAHSA – the agency she had been working with for nearly four years – and blamed the institution for results her administration oversaw.
John Alle, a business owner and co-founder of the Santa Monica Coalition, watched all of it.
"She doesn't get it," he told Fox News Digital.
He described conditions in Little Bangladesh – a community Bass had publicly held up as one of the city's success stories.
"The crime is so bad that we're finding people on the streets unconscious," Alle said. "We're having handymen pick up needles and dispose of them."
This is the city Adam Carolla grew up in.
This is the city Karen Bass is asking voters to let her run for four more years.
LA Lost 54,000 Residents Last Year and Democrats Want Four More Years
Los Angeles County has been losing residents since 2018.
In the pandemic year from mid-2020 to mid-2021, nearly 176,000 people left – the second-largest county population drop in the nation, trailing only New York.
The following year, another 90,000 packed up.
By the time Census data captured the 2024–2025 period, LA County's population had dropped below 10 million for the first time since 2020.
The people who left weren't moving to Hawaii to retire.
They were moving to Las Vegas – which gained 20,000 new residents in that same period – and to Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
They were moving "anywhere."
Carolla has been saying this for years – calling Newsom a "sociopath" and an "empty bag" with a "ten-cent head," describing a governor who responds to every hard question with talking points and walks away without an answer.
He announced he was leaving California not for any specific destination, not for retirement – but because staying had become the irrational choice.
"There's a difference between going, 'I want to live out my retirement years somewhere warm,'" Carolla said, "and just needing to get out."
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2097025833835639251?s=20
That distinction is everything.
Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass turned the city people once spent their whole lives working toward into the place people flee when they have no better plan.
Your city is next if Democrats get there first.
San Francisco watched its downtown empty out, saw its tax base relocate to Austin and Miami, and now holds press conferences about the comeback.
The playbook is the same everywhere: promise to fix homelessness, blame bureaucracy when it gets worse, ask for four more years.
He's leaving because he finally admitted what the moving trucks already knew – that what Democrats build, they don't fix, they just find someone else to blame.
Sources:
- Taylor Penley, "Adam Carolla says Los Angeles went from a city no one left to a place residents flee for 'anywhere' else," Fox News, September 8, 2026.
- Jarrett Stepman, "The California Exodus Grows as Affordability Crisis Pushes Residents Out," The Daily Signal, April 5, 2026.
- Kiera McDonald and Andrew Miller, "LA real estate vet comes at Mayor Bass with receipts over damning homelessness report," Fox News, July 30, 2026.
- Legal Insurrection Staff, "Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Pressed on Homeless Issue She Promised to Fix by 2026," Legal Insurrection, May 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "Adam Carolla says he's leaving 'horrible' California, pans 'sociopathic' Newsom," Fox News, 2024.
